If you’re heading out into the wilderness to find a record store, why not actually head out into the wilderness – the one with trees – and find music there?

Today, a you’ve no doubt heard, is Record Store Day. The official site is a useful resource, today and around the year. Today brings a number of special physical releases, favoring vinyl but also including CDs. A mobile app download will help you locate record stores in your city, both in the US and other countries around the world.

All of this does raise some deeper issues. Record stores can be terrific places, supporting artists with in-store events and introducing listeners to their music. But, more generally, is it meaningful to find ways of making music physical, and then finding a place to go hear it?

That question was asked compellingly this year by Really. Really itself is more than a conventional record label; it’s an inter-media arts collective (design, coding, visual arts, and the like included). Its charter sets out the goal between releases “to focus on the live aspect of music, on the fact that it is made first to be interpreted, by the musician and the audience.”

In a project called “Out of the Woods,” Really took a music release and made it truly locative in the physical sense. Playing with the digital intervention of placing physical USB drops in locations, the artists sent would-be listeners into the woods of the Grunewald. (I’m reminded of my dear friend Dave Karpf, with whom I worked at the Sierra Club, whose favorite motto was “get the f*** outdoors.”)

You need GPS to find the spot, and then, espionage-style, you pick up music from a log. Instructions read, charmingly, like this:

You will find Verspätete Erinnerung close to a path crossing almost the whole forest.
The dead tree, laying on the ground, is burnt from the inside, but blossoms on the outside. Have a look at its heart, we tried to bring our own kind of life there as well!

GPS: 52.486442,13.243954

look carefully for a black cable
inside the tree

We’ve seen other locative works, of course – most recently, a virtual piece employed GPS in locations like Central Park. But here, much like that expedition to your record store, you travel to a location on a quest to get music that you can’t find via other means. You acquire, hunter-gatherer style.

It’s worth considering that the recording itself is an anomaly in the history of music. “Old-timers” talk about recordings as though these strange objects are music, and as such, the perceived assault on their physical distribution and attack on the value of music itself. Yet, travel back in time just a couple of centuries in the millennia-long saga of human music making, and the recorded music object would seem like some dark art, a captured moment in time freezing something that is normally live, in-person, and human.

This is not to say that these strange inventions we’ve created that store frozen time are a bad thing. But, then, maybe that explains the record store: it treats them as something sacred, and restores the sense of place. It requires that you experience music with other human beings.

And while I admire Record Store Day, there is a certain throwback quality to the entire event – Android and iPhone apps notwithstanding. Even the graphic design of the site, complete with retro records, and the contests, with historically-styled record players and commemorative Queen drums, seems tinged with nostalgia.

Nostalgia is one of the things that music can make us feel, but music can also send us out into the wilderness. And if the record industry grew out of absurd ideas – Edison and his imagined technology for recording business memos – maybe music can take on more absurd and wonderful ideas yet.

It’s enough to make you want to wander out in the woods, and off the beaten path. Record store today, wilderness tomorrow.

Really used a collaborative team to make their project (below). How will you figure out how to distribute your next album? Will you try to get it in the hands of lots of people – or make just one, and give it to someone you love?

— Lorenzo Cercelletta – organization, installation, design process & video editing
— Valentina Ciarapica – video shooting & editing
— Katrin Dathe – installation support
— Wiley Hoard – photographs
— Matthieu Pons – organization, installation, design process & coding
— Gino Ruggeri – backstage video shooting & editing
— Juliane Teitge – organization, drawings & installation

http://rreeaallllyy.com/map.php

Music in the woods, as seen on The Creators Project and Sugarhigh

Record Store Day, as seen many places, including our friends at Synthtopia

There was a time when the ability to record and playback music didn’t exist – such things were magical fiction no one had seen. So, the idea of playing one channel of recorded sound, then two channels, had to be invented. Artists hadn’t created something called an “album” until there were devices that played back that monophonic and stereophonic sound; even the idea that such a strange art counted as “music” had to be constructed. It’s obvious now, but it’s easy to forget that these musical forms were produced to cater to the capabilities of what was once a new device.

Now that your music device can do more than play a couple of channels of sound, will musicians find use in those features? Or are they just distractions? Can the fact that your music player knows where you are be as important as the fact that it can play audio?

We saw the work of Bluebrain, the Washington, DC-based duo of Hays Holladay & Ryan Holladay, before. They’ve been slowly building up a repertoire of locative art, starting with the Mall in DC. Their first full-length album came to Central Park, as documented beautifully in a short film that details the creation of the music and software, and various critics responding to its significance.

The most compelling image recurring in the film may be their scrawled-upon map of the city itself. It’s clear in those images that composition and place converge: the map itself becomes a score for the music, a topography of interaction through the landmark park.

One of those people interviewed in the film, briefly, is me. You’ll see some of the answers from the interviewees don’t entirely agree with others. Rather than focus on the novelty of the thing, I chose to look at their work as rooted in history. It’s not entirely clear whether the musical card game attributed to Mozart was his work, but various aleatoric and algorithmic approaches to composition pre-date even recording, let alone GPS. That to me gives a context and a continuity to these kinds of activities.

But beyond the meaning of “disruptive” technology as one person puts it, what the film conveys most is the artists’ love of where they are. They’re not making an album that’s an app, they hasten to add. They really just want you to hear this music in this particular place, moving in these particular ways. The fact that they record an organ that is part of where they grew up is added evidence.

If you’re going to South by Southwest, you can experience this application when you’re in Austin, as covered in an article on The Creators’ Project. You should do it if you’re there, especially as you otherwise can’t hear this music without going to the National Mall or New York’s Central Park.

Choose-Your-Own-Adventure App Album Debuts At SXSW

In a way, though, that seems to me the least interesting of these applications. Perhaps I’m biased in that I have a connection in my life to Manhattan and not so much to downtown Austin. But to me, the arguably-perverse requirement that you go to a place in order to hear a work seems part of the joy of these creations. Having it switch on in a place already full of iPhone-toting Web geeks deeply in love with GPS seems to take out the fun and the challenge. It comes to its audience; the other works demand an audience come to it.

What the duo succeeded in doing in New York and DC – even though these places are landmarks – is making the ever-present software somehow more ephemeral. It works in one place, and then it’s gone. Like the generative limited edition we saw last month, it undercuts the very ubiquity that seems to be digital music’s fundamental character.

And yes, greetings, New York and New Yorkers; I love where I am, but I do miss you. Unlike in software, in the real world, we can’t be more than one place at once. We have to be alive, and we have to do what we’re doing now. We are where we are, and we’re not somewhere else. If you aren’t there when someone plays, you miss it. You have to choose.

And perhaps that’s what is sometimes missing in our music and technology.

Previously:
An Album That Can Be Heard Only in One Location, in Interactive Ode to Washington, D.C.

More:
Bluebrain’s Music, locative and non-locative alike

A free app download for iOS, for use in Austin, TX

Listen in Central Park

I love reviews. One person writes on the iTunes App Store about the Central Park app, “Weirdest music we have ever heard. Creepy, eerie noise.” You can’t please everyone.

I’m also quoted in a story in The New York Times from December:
Central Park, the Soundtrack

I believe I did the interview from Amsterdam (ironically, the old one), and apparently said:

“It’s not just that they are using this as a novel delivery mechanism. It’s part of their musical process. They are forcing you to go to a place because that place for them is musically meaningful.”

“You had to be there.” Live performance has always been dictated by being present in a particular place, at a particular time. Now, the same is true of an interactive album produced by brothers Hays and Ryan Holladay, aka Bluebrain.

Both a two-man band and a two-man development team, there’s no clear dividing line between “coder” and “musician” for the artists on this project. But the only way to hear the work is to physically go to Washington, D.C.’s National Mall, and begin walking around. The satellites that populate the GPS received in your smartphone, currently on iOS but with an Android release planned, realize the work. You, and your device, then, participate in a kind of performance. The album is the first of a series; New York’s Flushing Meadows, site of a World’s Fair and a failed Olympics bid, is next.

The Washington Post‘s Chris Richards talk with the two artists; I’m quoted as the story pans back to look at music technology in general:
Bluebrain make magic with the world’s first location aware album [Washington Post]

It’s well worth a full read, as the artists describe some of their intentions, and claim they’re uninterested in this as technological gimmick. Richards also explains the experience of hearing the work, since not all of us can go to DC:

Approach that crazy-looking thing while listening to “The National Mall,” and you’ll hear a keyboard weep. Get closer and digital cellos begin to trace a regal melody. Closer. There’s percussion. Keep going. The volume creeps up. The drums push toward anarchy. Walk right up to the monument, press your hand against the cool, smooth stone and listen, as if the obelisk were a giant radio needle receiving some riotous transmission from deep space.

At one point when Richards interviewed me for the story, he asked me point blank whether technology’s greater impact has been on distribution or production. Caught off guard – it’s a question so fundamental I hadn’t really thought to choose – I found myself choosing production. After all, while distribution has been profound, the advent of recording, not the advent of the computer, is the fundamental breakthrough. But with computer music software, the ability to re-imagine what music actually is has taken the grandest leap since the gramophone.

Ironically, though, Bluebrain are taking the same approach to conventional recording technology as they are the new smartphone – they’re intervening to ensure music is limited and local. A “surprise” record release earlier this year not only went straight-to-vinyl (see previous editorial here), but required that you go to an actual store in the DC area.

In vinyl, the approach is an intentional throwback. In digital, it suggests a new way of making music for a space with a device as the medium rather than live performance.

There have certainly been locative digital works before this one, but I couldn’t think of one that was introduced as an album in this way. Then again, if the idea is worthwhile, it may prove worth repeating.

Follow Bluebrain’s work via their blog and site (and you may have to literally follow it, geographically):
http://bluebrainmusic.blogspot.com/
http://bluebra.in/

And do point us to other examples of locative work – including anything that might challenge their claim of being first, at least for our historical benefit.

Sometimes things look interesting even before you can fully grasp just what they mean. Such is the case, I think, with what’s happening with SoundCloud’s on-the-go tools. Now, back in the beginning of this service, I predicted it’d become the Flickr of audio, and I wasn’t alone. But it’s becoming something else, something that really involves mobility.

The SoundCloud crew are out at South by Southwest, as good a gathering as any for the intersection of Web nerd culture with music and film. And they have something to show for it, too: they’re unveiling new Android and iOS mobile apps, among other updates – and location, with FourSquare.

Android phone owners certainly no longer need to feel like second-class citizens, with bug fixes, track commenting, and Twitter and Facebook sharing. You can also add widgets to your homescreen, a feature that iOS lacks. (I have to say, for all of iOS’ sophistication, the one thing Android does very well is make apps integrate with one another, and with data and the cloud.)

There are updates not only for Android, but iOS and desktop, too, detailed in a blog post geared for South by Southwest:
Create & Share (Even) More Easily

Both Android and iOS users get Foursquare interaction. That could mean … well, something. The ability to make recording a sound an event, to tie it to a place in the real world, is theoretically compelling. Exactly what you’d do with this data I think has a lot to do with the content itself. Might this be a way to tie, say, a live set to the venue at which it was played, or sound samples of an interactive art gallery installation, or an open mic night that has recordings and not just pictures? Possibly – although there’s nothing saying you really need a fancy tool to do those things, either.

With the Interactive portion out of the way, SoundCloud now gets unleashed on South by Southwest’s Music Festival, which has grown to an extent that it feels like all musical output has collided on one point. It’s a quantum singularity as much as a music festival. So we’ll see if SoundCloud does something interesting at those events – or if it’s just another eager Web name against the backdrop of a lot of booze-drenched music parties. And to me, it’s an open question how to use these tools to get more people in person, in the flesh, at live events, which I think for many musicians is the goal. (That is, you’d use SoundCloud to encourage people to get off their computers and go hear some live music!)

SoundCloud isn’t sitting around hoping you’ll figure it out, though; they have some tips:
SoundCloud 101: How to host your events sampler!
SoundCloud 101

Any of you in Austin or elsewhere in the musical world, if you do catch cool stuff happening with SoundCloud or other Internet-enabled audio, we’d love to hear about it.

There’s the music player, the device in your home or your pocket on which you listen to the album. And there’s the concert experience, where you have a couple of longnecks and get sweaty and dance with your friends to live musicians.

But wait a minute – now the musicians are using computers and music players to perform. What if that music player became part of the interaction at a live gig?

Richie Hawtin is going live with a new show via his Plastikman persona – great news to those of us who love his original work. Part of the new tour is an experiment with an iPhone app called SYNK, developed under Richie’s watchful eye with Minus’ Bryan McDade and TouchOSC developer RJ Fischer (hexler.net). I tried to get more details on how the app will work, but apparently they’re trying to keep some of it under wraps until the first show in Mannheim this weekend. (If you are making the Mannheim show, I’d love to get your coverage – it looks like the East Coast of the US didn’t make the cut.)

We do know a little, though, and that already raises questions – and likely some skepticism, too, I imagine – about how mobile devices could be integrated with performance. There’s a very jumpy “teaser” video, below, too:

Watching closely, I see

• Numbers running behind the stage and on the iPhone, some pattern of rects on the iPhone
• Visualist collective Derivative’s modular, visual-making software TouchDesigner
• An Ableton Live set with an obscene number of effects (12!) sends, for reasons that are unclear to me
• A Max for Live patch that uses the Live API (and is sending OSC via IP address, presumably to interface with the iPhone)

The application itself includes modules that allow the audience to reorganize word samples (a bit like playing with magnetic poetry), a live video stream of the performance from the inside out, visuals that appear on your iPhone/iPod touch that are synchronized with the onstage LED wall and music, and real-time performance information (apparently synchronous with handheld software that’s used for the performance itself).

The most interesting part of all of this is that it’s location-based: it’s designed only to work when you’re live at the show. Between shows, however, there is a mode that includes a self-contained audiovisual experience.

While part of the appeal to me of live performance is getting away from all my own technology and listening, it is encouraging to see creative experimentation, and mobile software that’s about more than just the artists promoting themselves.

More on the modules (including some special information passed along to CDM from the Plastikman crew):

The official description:

LOGIKAL
Based upon earlier “Lodgikal Nonsense” and “Vokx” voice tracks, this state invites the audience to re-organize the word samples using a user interface of 20 touch buttons. In this state the centre of performance control is moved from the stage and into the audience.

KAMERA
This state is accessible throughout the show and gives users a live video stream of an internal perspective of the performance.

SYNKOTIK
This state explores the synkronicity of realtime-generated percussion patterns and their visual counterparts, integrating the stage LED wall and the built in displays on each SYNK activated iPhone/iPod Touch.

KONSOLE
This state is active during the entire show with realtime performance information. At specific moments an extended Konsole state becomes activated, allowing further insight into the realtime programming of the performance’s drum and percussive elements, while also providing visual feedback of musical and effect parameters. A simplified remote Konsole is available to all SYNK users worldwide and will be activated during all Plastikman Live performances.

Participants should connect to the Plastikman Wi-Fi network at each performance and will be notified of the activation of the different states by their iPhone/iPod Touch at specific moments during the show.

The SYNK experience will not be limited to viewers of the live show. In between the performances the SYNK application will be in sleeper mode and function as a Plastikman atmospheric location shifter. By using visualizations inspired by Derivative, combined with the iPhone’s built-in microphone and accelerometer, users are immersed in a Plastikman environment. For best results, please use headphones.

The “sleeper mode” confused a number of people, so I inquired further. Minus helped us out a bit.

Bryan McDade tells CDM:

“[Sleeper mode] is the visualization which takes place as the default interface into the app when there is not a functioning show. The app uses some visuals inspired by design from the people at Derivative and the microphone picks up audio and plays it back through the speaker while warping the audio with the use of the accelerometer. The audio function has been compared to RJDJ by others in the online community.”

Richie Hawtin adds:

The idea of the sleeper mode is to give users the feeling of bring immersed in their own personal Consumed type environment modulated by their movements and the ambient sounds around them.

Sounds great to me; I’d love to see apps beyond just RjDj that run with this idea. It’s such a great idea, in fact, that I wonder how performances could cater to multiple phone platforms, not just iPhone.

I’m excited to hear more about the tour and about the development of Synk, and I have to hope they add more dates or I find some way to cross paths. Stay tuned for more details.

The tour:

27.03. Time Warp – Mannheim, Germany
18.04. Coachella – Indio, USA
08.05. WeLoveArt – Paris, France
21.05. Dissonanze – Rome, Italy
29.05. Movement – Detroit, USA
18.06. Sonar – Barcelona, Spain
11.07. T in the Park – Balado, Scotland
06.08. Sonne, Mond & Sterne – Saalburg, Germany
07.08. AudioRiver – Plock, Poland
21.08. Lowlands – Biddinghuizen, Netherlands
10.09. Sunday Best presents Bestival – Isle of Wight, UK

SYNK @ iTunes

SYNK @ hexler

plastikman.com

GPS Beatmap from Jesse Stiles on Vimeo.

“Locative art,” the idea that somehow location will feed into music and visuals, has eluded culture. We have the technology, in the form of sophisticated databases of location information and highly accurate, publicly-available GPS satellites. But it’s one of those solutions in search of a problem, and begs the question, why?

That is, until you unleash a nearly 6-liter V8 Ford LTD Crown Victoria on the legendary Bonneville Salt Flats, and your driving gets translated to music. Now it makes sense. And sweeping through the salty dust in one of America’s greatest action-car-chase cars of all time, manipulating music on a Max/MSP software patch, all becomes right with the world. (That’s how it is in my head, anyway.)

The planet is your control surface.

Such is the project sent by co-creator Jesse Stiles, who worked with Rich Pell (and editor/documentarian Olivia Robinson) under the name Face Removal Services to perform this vehicular musical production. (Thank, as well, The Center for Land Use Interpretation / GPS Expo 2006. PS – I think we now know what to do with all those clunkers Americans are turning in for Cash for Clunkers.)

Now, this covers only X and Y axis. I think we need to add the Z-axis, for base jumpers. (I had a dream last night in which I was hang gliding from the rim of the Grand Canyon to the Colorado River below, a reminder that the Earth – and computer interfaces – do not have to be flat.)